LITERATURE REVIEW
The concept of Supply Chain Management and technologically managing inventory has
helped a lot of companies to compete more effectively in their business markets. Kannan and
Tan (2004) point out the three popular methods used in order to ensure that the product or
service is delivered to the customer in the most efficient way possible. These three methods are
JIT, Total Quality Management (TQM), and SCM. All three of these methods go hand in hand
because they force the company to eliminate waste while increasing the quality of their products
and distribution systems. Their research demonstrates that integrated inventory management
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methods are correlated with firm financial performance. Using return of assets (ROA) as a
measure of financial performance, Kannan and Tan (2004) set out to not only reiterate the impact
on firm’s operational performance, but also point out that the firm’s business performance can
benefit from an inventory management system. Their results concluded that integrating a
technological inventory management system results in higher ROA.
Shah and Shin (2007) investigate the relationship among IT investment, inventory, and
financial performance with industry sector level data of 1960 to 1999. They find that lower
inventory levels lead to higher financial performance in manufacturing sector. Their conclusion
is that there exists indirect effect on financial performance through inventory management from
IT investment. Liberman and Demeester (1999) study Japanese car manufacturers’ JIT
production with data of late 1960s to early 1990s. They find that there is a causal relationship
between work-in-process inventory and firm’s productivity, i.e., 10% reduction in inventory
leads to 1% increase of labor productivity. Thomas (2002) studies inventory changes and future
returns with data from 1970 through 1997. He finds that a firm with inventory increase has
experiences higher level of profitability, however, this trend changes immediately with a change
of inventory decrease. He finds the negative relationship between inventory level and firm’s
profitability but he cannot explain the reason. The result from Thomas (2002) conflicts with
results from both Liberman and Demeester (1999) and Shah and Shin (2007). Chen, Frank and
Wu (2005) investigate inventories of U.S. manufacturing companies in the last two decades of
20th century. They find that firms with high inventory have poor long-term stock returns while
firms with slightly lower than average inventory have good stock returns. However, firms with
lowest inventory have only normal returns. All four papers study about the relationship with
financial performance of U.S. manufacturing industry. But their results are not consistent. The
data used in the previous four papers are data of 20th century. Roumiantsev and Netessine (2007)
investigated linkage of inventory behavior with financial performance. They found that lower
inventory levels are positively associated with return on sales. Capkun et al. (2009) found a
significant positive correlation between inventory performance and measures of financial
performance in manufacturing companies over 26 year period from 1980 to 2005.
Profitability is a concept that a lot of executives and shareholders put emphasis on. This
shows them that their company is operating at a level to where more money is coming in than
leaving the company. Gill, Biger, and Muthur (2010) discusses the relationship that occurs
between the firm’s working capital management and profitability. They define working capital as
being involved with current assets and current liabilities while being able to finance these current
assets. The main difference between inventory management and working capital management is
the fact that working capital management involves managing all of the current assets while
inventory management focuses its efforts on inventories alone. Gill et al. (2010) stated that they
do not see any relationship between days of accounts payable and profitability or even with days
in inventory and profitability. They note that past studies have given results that differ from their
own. Given conflicting results in previous studies, we are motivated to offer evidence as to
whether inventory management and profitability are related.